The International Water Summit (IWS) is a global platform for promoting water sustainability in arid regions by bringing together world leaders, field experts, academics and business innovators to accelerate the development of new sustainable strategies and technologies. Videos from the 2017 summit cover a wide range of technologies and innovations which support SDG 6 Clean Water and Sanitation and SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities.

Photos of a beach on Henderson Island in the Pacific Ocean provides yet more evidence of the detrimental impact that packaging and other plastics waste is having on the environment globally. Creating a virtuous circle out of what, until now, has largely been a chain of production from feedstock to consumer will not be easy. But it is the innovation aspect that has fired the imagination of producers, processors and corporate consumers of plastics packaging. This fits with SDG 9.4 to upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable, with increased resource-use efficiency and greater adoption of clean and environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes and SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy.

This brief article presents a renewed and strengthened version of Kate Raworth’s well-known Doughnut model, which describes the social and ecological boundaries to human wellbeing. The model shows twelve dimensions and their illustrative indicators are derived from internationally agreed minimum standards for human wellbeing, and it relates to nearly all of the SDGs.

Open defecation is a major global health problem. The number of open defecators in India dwarfs that of other states and most live in rural places. Attempts to end rural open defecation by targeting individuals, like social marketing or behaviour change approaches, often ignore the structural inequalities that shape rural residents’ everyday lives.
Our study explores the role of remoteness in sustaining open defecation in rural India, advancing knowledge on SDG 6. We deploy the concept of remoteness as an analytical tool that can capture everyday practices of open defecation as a function of physical and social distance.

Urban water and energy systems have essential and multiple interlinkages that should be considered when assessing the effects of efficiency and sustainability measures. A prototype Reference Resource to Service System (RRSS) framework is used to represent the urban water-energy nexus and linked impacts of measures. Indicative analysis based on example data for New York City reveals large variability in multi-resource and climate mitigation benefits. This paper relates to SDG's 6,7 and 11.

This study illustrates how consumer social risk footprints can assist in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For their social footprint, The authors select 4 indicators related to five of the UN's SDGs: gender equality (SDG 5 also 8.5 & 8.8); mother and child health (SDG 3, especially 3.1 & 3.2); governance (SDG 16, especially 16.5 & 16.6); and access to clean water (SDG 6, especially 6.1 & 6.2). The results discussed are important for the UN in developing partnerships to address the SDG's and for organisations such as the World Bank, Trade Unions and NGOs' work towards a fairer world.

The study addresses how food production can continue using reduced water whilst at the same time bring about improved health. The growing population in India will have an impact on water availability to be used in agriculture and so the study looks at dietary patterns which use less water. They find important synergies in diets with lower water use and positive health effects. This is in-line with the achievement of SDG 2, its related targets and to a further extent SDG 6.

Critics claim that maize can cause unwanted environmental impacts. But supporters of the crop are able to show how by use of cover crops it can be grown responsibly, reducing or eliminating, for example, nutrient leaching and soil erosion. In south-west England, a Wessex Water project is using cover crops to protect and improve drinking water quality by working with growers whose farms surround boreholes and reservoirs that supply water for human consumption. Steps like this can contribute to SDG 6 to ensure sustainable management of water and SDG 12 to ensure sustainable production.

Despite the increased attention the sixth Sustainable Development Goal (clean water and sanitation) has brought, access to water in Sub-Saharan Africa is worse than ever: there are more people without access to water now than there were in 1990.
In order to fix the problem we need to understand what’s going wrong with our current approaches. That was the aim of an Atlas Award-winning study published in Water Resources and Rural Development, by researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland, the University of Malawi in Malawi and the University of Lusaka in Zambia. Interestingly enough, since women and school aged girls are typically tasked with water fetching, by providing water access and sanitation authors feel there is an effect on others SDG like SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), SDG 4 (quality education) and SDG 5 (gender equality)

Effective communication to citizens is of prime importance during public health crises involving water. This paper takes a sequential mixed method approach to the problem of communicating drinking water risks prevention of exposure to health risks in cities, related to SDG 6: clean water and sanitation.